AP: Vaccine storage demands could leave 3B people in virus cold
“From factory to syringe, the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates need nonstop sterile refrigeration to work. But despite great strides in equipping developing countries to maintain the vaccine ‘cold chain,’ nearly 3 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people live in places with insufficient temperature-controlled storage for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control. The result: Poor people around the world are likely to be the last to emerge from the pandemic…” (Hinnant/Mednick, 10/19).

Reuters: Pfizer says earliest U.S. filing for COVID-19 vaccine would be late November
“Pfizer Inc. said on Friday it could file in late November for U.S. authorization of the COVID-19 vaccine it is developing, suggesting that a vaccine could potentially be available in the United States by the end of the year. That timeline makes it unlikely, however, that a vaccine will be available before the U.S. election, as President Donald Trump has promised. Pfizer, which is developing the vaccine with German partner BioNTech, said that it may confirm if the vaccine is effective as soon as this month but that it also needs safety data from a 44,000-person clinical trial that will not be available until next month…” (Mishra et al., 10/16).

Additional coverage of potential coronavirus vaccines and the logistics of distribution is available from Bloomberg, Democracy Now!, Financial Times, Forbes, Reuters, STAT, and Wall Street Journal.